It’s two hours until game time, and a sea of red grows outside Truist Park, the home stadium of the Atlanta Braves. Thousands of baseball fans are decked out in the team’s gear, lined up at gates that are not yet open. The Braves have an enthusiastic and large fan base, so the scene is not unusual. Maybe the crowd is even a little bigger than ordinarily because this Tuesday evening game in late May includes a giveaway of bobbleheads of Ronald Acuña Jr., the team’s biggest star. (Acuña, unfortunately, had gone down with a season-ending injury two days earlier.)
Walking through the crowd is a tall, fit, white-haired man in a “business casual” shirt and pants. Not a single fan appears to take notice of him. Greg Heller likes it that way. Mr. Flamboyant, he’s not. Mr. Attention Magnet? Definitely not. Given the option, he’ll sit quietly at meetings or events in inconspicuous spots.
But if you want a problem solved or a sticky situation negotiated, if you want thoroughly researched and sound legal advice, if you want someone with excellent business sense and judgment, if you want a consummate corporate team leader and team member, then turn your attention to Greg Heller. That’s what other leaders of the Braves do.
For more than two decades, the leaders of what is now known as Braves Holdings, parent company for the team and its large real estate and business undertakings, have relied on Heller. For the most visible example, consider the abovementioned gathering place: The fans may not pay attention to the plaque on the exterior walls of Truist Park, honoring those who made possible the opening in 2017 of the Braves’ stadium and the booming entertainment and business district that surrounds it. But if they did, they would find the name “Greg Heller” among the half dozen names enshrined there.
“Executive vice president” and “chief legal officer”—those are Heller’s titles. The titles of “family man” and “engaged Catholic” are also important to him.
And of particular note here, there’s one more title: “Marquette lawyer.”
“You have lawyers, and you have business lawyers.”
Terry McGuirk cannot walk through a crowd around the Braves stadium and go unrecognized. He was the number two executive behind Ted Turner when Turner’s sports and entertainment ventures—TBS, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, major sports franchises in Atlanta, and more—were changing America. McGuirk is now chairman and CEO of Braves Holdings. He has also been a leading figure in many Atlanta civic projects, including the 1996 Olympic Games.
How would he describe Greg Heller? “Greg’s pretty unflappable. Very low-key. A good listener. A high intellect.” Heller is someone who takes on problems and comes back with solutions, McGuirk said. He has a robust basis for that assessment: he estimates that he has been involved in a thousand conversations about problems with Heller, leading to about that many solutions. “He’s a great leader for us,” McGuirk said. Heller has immense institutional knowledge, and he knows baseball, real estate, and municipal relations. “We all appreciate him,” McGuirk said. He adds that Heller is a great family man.
The Braves are more than an “ordinary” major league baseball team. What the franchise has done in the last decade-plus is remarkable. The story of the success of the Braves in increasing their financial power and vitality involves not only the baseball team (they won the World Series in 2021), but also the almost unprecedented real estate development around the team.
Derek Schiller, president and CEO of the Atlanta Braves, described Heller as “a thoughtful, intellectual, kind-hearted, genuine, legally sound gentleman.” He reconsidered the last part: “Legally sound may be an understatement.” Greg is “very much a legal scholar and somebody we rely upon.” He added, “You have lawyers, and you have business lawyers.” Heller knows how to apply the law to business and make business better. “Greg is absolutely a business-minded lawyer,” Schiller said. Among other things, this means that Heller doesn’t like a fight for its own sake but rather encourages a broader or more strategic perspective. “He might say, ‘You could win this particular legal contest, but consider the ancillary issues,’” Schiller observed.
How did Heller react to being called a business lawyer? “I sort of pride myself on that,” he said.
The Battery Atlanta: A bold idea becomes a thriving reality
To make a very long story short, the Braves decided in the early 2010s to move out of the heart of Atlanta and gamble on building a new stadium. It would be paired with a large mixed-use entertainment, business, and residential development, on a long-unused 60-acre parcel of land about a dozen miles northwest of the downtown. The site was literally in the next county, moving from Fulton County to Cobb County. At the time, there was much controversy in political and civic leadership circles over the move.
Braves officials argued that they were moving toward the heart of where their fans lived, that there was too little development around their old downtown stadiums (Fulton County Stadium, where Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run, and then Turner Field, built initially for the 1996 Olympics), and that they couldn’t pursue their vision of developing a financially strong (and therefore competitive) franchise in their current location.
Heller said that the Braves tried unsuccessfully for several years to reach an agreement with political leaders to allow the kind of development they wanted in downtown Atlanta. There were infrastructure problems; traffic and parking problems discouraged many people from coming to the stadium; and 20 years after the Olympics, there was little development that would attract visitors to the stadium area, Heller said.
An extensive search for a new site ended up focusing on the undeveloped land near the juncture of two major expressways. The land was owned by a real estate company from Baltimore. A big reason for its not having been developed was that three natural gas pipelines ran underneath it. Seeking to avoid early attention, the Braves created a real estate arm that didn’t use the word Braves in the name. The fact that it was the Braves seeking to buy the property didn’t become known even to some of the key figures until after agreements were struck.
“Greg was in that cauldron every step of the way,” McGuirk said. Heller was among those who met with the owner of the land and reached agreement to purchase the key tract for about $34.2 million. He was also part of reaching an agreement with the pipeline company to relocate the pipelines, generally to the periphery of the property, with the new owners paying for this, a step estimated at around $14 million. Heller also became immersed in negotiations with Cobb County officials—negotiations that were complicated and tense at times but ultimately successful. It helped in big ways that the Braves were putting up the bulk of the capital funding from their own sources and were seeking relatively small amounts of public money for improvements related to the project.
Heller said that the night the Cobb County Board of Commissioners approved the broad agreement was one of the best moments of his career.
The result is extraordinary. The land was basically undeveloped in 2014. On April 14, 2017, the Braves opened what was then called SunTrust Park (later renamed Truist Park). Another highlight of Heller’s career: He was introduced on the field at that opening game.
But the stadium is only part of the story. The rest of the 60-acre tract has been developed, largely by Braves Holdings, and has boomed. The area is called “The Battery Atlanta,” and it encompasses an array of hotels, restaurants, storefront entertainment centers, a 3,600-seat-live music venue called the Coca-Cola Roxy, and generous space for hanging out in the open air, including a popular splashpad just outside the stadium. It also includes corporate headquarters for several businesses. There are 3,000 condos within walking distance of the stadium and substantial amounts of space in parking structures.
The Battery Atlanta does not offer theme-park entertainment like roller coasters or water rides, and it doesn’t have attractions such as beautiful views of nature. But it has become a magnet for people from throughout the southeastern United States.
Mike Plant, president and CEO of Braves Development Company, has been involved from the start in creating the district. He said those involved wanted to answer this question: “How do we create a year-round destination and entertainment center?” They wanted “a halo effect” around the baseball stadium. Plant described the combination of the stadium and the Battery as “a lifestyle destination.”
Plant said that before all the development occurred, the two adjacent expressways meant that 400,000 cars a day passed the undeveloped land—and no one paid any attention to the property. In 2023, about 10.3 million people came to the Battery. That includes people who bought 3.2 million tickets to Braves games and 7.1 million who came because of other things the Battery offers. “We are the number one mixed-use lifestyle destination in the Southeast,” Plant said. “We’re in the people-gathering business.” Even on days when there aren’t games or during the off-season, large numbers of people visit the area.
(Plant, by the way, has an interesting personal history. He grew up in West Allis, Wisconsin, and was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic speed skating team with Eric Heiden, who won five gold medals at that Olympics. He and Heiden remain close friends. Plant’s many roles since then include numerous involvements with the U.S. Olympic Committee and serving as executive vice president of Turner Sports before joining the Braves.)
McGuirk said the Battery is “a direct response to our fans telling us they wanted to have these kinds of amenities.” They wanted to come early, stay late, hang around. The area is a “destination,” he said.
Two days of this writer’s hanging around the Battery and Truist Park supported McGuirk’s view. The area—roughly six city blocks by three blocks—is oriented toward pedestrian traffic, with limited vehicle access (and around game times, even that is mostly cut off). The sidewalks are busy; people relax inside and outside restaurants, bars, ice cream shops, and other storefronts. Kids play. The atmosphere is relaxed—sort of a combination of a shopping mall and a tourist destination. And much is spent in commerce and on entertainment.
The term battery is an old baseball term, referring to the pitcher and catcher. And the name has a sense of energy ….
How did the Braves executives come up with The Battery Atlanta name? Schiller said the Braves contracted for an elaborate naming study, done over 8 to 10 months of creative design work. A list of names was proposed. “We didn’t use a single one of them,” he said.
“The Battery” was an early idea by members of the executive group, Schiller said. The term battery is an old baseball term, referring to the pitcher and catcher. And the name has a sense of energy, he said—as in something that holds a charge. They made it “The Battery Atlanta” to differentiate it from other places in the country using “Battery.”
The success of Truist Park and the Battery has sharply increased the value of the original piece of land, as well as surrounding areas. And tens of millions of dollars’ worth of further development in the vicinity is underway currently.
Heller also played an important role in the development of a spring training facility for the Braves in North Port, Florida. The development, CoolToday Park, opened in 2019. It also offers
year-round facilities for special events.
Braves leaders say that with the success of Truist Park and the Battery, they have created a new path for American sports complexes, one that others have aimed to emulate (including the much smaller Deer District adjacent to the Fiserv Forum arena in downtown Milwaukee). Plant said representatives of about 250 sports franchises from around the world have visited to see what the Braves did and learn how they did it. “We have the recipe and the secret sauce to get this done,” Plant said.
As for Greg Heller’s role, Plant said Heller was “a huge presence” in the whole process. “Calmness, that’s what I like about Greg,” he said. He said Heller is authentic, smart, a problem solver. You can bounce ideas off him or get advice. “He’s been a huge part of this team. He works tirelessly.”
Living the values learned in Peoria
Heller describes himself as “a German Irish Catholic Protestant whose dad owned a beer company.” Each of those things—including the beer company—is important to his personal story.
He grew up in Peoria, Ill., the youngest of three sons. He played football, basketball, and baseball and ran track. Peoria, he said, was a great place to grow up. At that time, the city was thriving, with an economy built largely on the then-huge operations of Caterpillar, the world-renowned maker of construction and mining equipment, and on Bradley University. Heller grew up a fan of Bradley basketball and the Chicago Cubs. Trips to see a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, about 175 miles away, were a highlight of each year.
His mother was a devout Catholic; his father a strong Protestant. But they respected each other, each other’s faith, and the good things in other people.
Heller’s father was the Peoria-area distributor for Old Style beer. Heller says that meant his father dealt with a wide range of people, from operators of small bars to larger vendors of beer and liquor. He said he learned from his father to treat everyone well. In his 1992 application to Marquette Law School, Heller wrote, “From the time I was a little boy, the importance of hard work has been instilled in me. . . . My father would take me with him on his rounds to various customers. I was given an opportunity to see how hard work could build a business. . . . Later, interacting with the different people that I met on my own delivery route enabled me to work with anyone.”
This is clearly true, more than three decades later, and the values Heller picked up from his family and from life growing up in Peoria remain a big part of him. He and his wife, Krista, began dating while they were in high school. He was 15; she was 14, Krista Heller recalled. Greg’s best friend wanted to meet Krista’s best friend. Greg and Krista were part of making that happen. Both couples ended up marrying. “We’ve grown up together,” she said of her relationship with her husband. She said their relationship has only grown deeper and closer over time.
Greg Heller left Peoria for Indiana University, where he initially chose to major in accounting. Following his love of sports, he switched to majoring in sports management. And after graduating, he headed to Marquette Law School, which was beginning to develop its specialty in sports law. The sports law program was small and wasn’t housed in Sensenbrenner Hall, then the home of the Law School. It was located in offices about six blocks away. But the program grew, and so did Heller’s involvement in law, both related to sports and more broadly. As a student, Heller became a member of the Sports Law Society and an articles editor of the Marquette Sports Law Journal (as it was then named). While in law school, he had internships with the National Sports Law Institute, based at Marquette Law School, and with the Milwaukee Brewers, Harley-Davidson, and Reece & Lang PC, the legal division of an Atlanta-based sports-law management firm.
A year after Heller started at Indiana, Krista also enrolled in the university. They got engaged while Heller was in law school in Milwaukee. They were then together in Milwaukee during his third year in law school. When Heller graduated in 1996, he went to work as an associate attorney with a small firm in Atlanta.
Heller credits the next crucial step to Paul Anderson, a friend and the Marquette law professor who is now director of the school’s National Sports Law Institute. Anderson has been involved for more than 25 years with helping scores of sports law students and alumni find jobs.
The small Atlanta firm where Heller worked had become part of a much larger firm. One of Heller’s colleagues had gone from that firm to an in-house role at Ted Turner’s Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., then the owner of the Braves. Around that time, the Hellers had moved to Chicago so that Greg could take a position with a law firm there.
But Anderson sent Heller an email saying that Turner Broadcasting was seeking a staff counsel for its Turner Sports business ventures. That led the Hellers, then with two small children, to decide their future lay in Atlanta. They moved back to the city in 2000, and Heller began as in-house counsel working for Turner’s sports interests. Heller was involved in many of the major steps for Turner businesses and Atlanta sports franchises, including Turner’s sale of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team and the Atlanta Thrashers hockey team. Heller was the assistant general counsel of the Braves for more than six years during Turner ownership and then transitioned in 2007 to general counsel when Turner sold that team to John Malone’s Liberty Media Corporation.
Heller said his involvement in family and faith are keys to who he is. His faith, he said, “just sort of grounds me. It’s my rock.” It leads him to the belief that people are more important than baseball games. “I have a deeper faith about life,” he said. For one thing, he said, “Life is too short to be a jerk.”
Krista Heller described her husband in some of the same terms that work colleagues used. “He’s extremely humble and gracious,” she said. “He has a passion for the law. He takes time for people. He treats everybody the same, no matter their position.” He’s a good listener, and he’s easy to talk to, she said. He loves the Braves, “but it doesn’t define him.” Does the team’s performance affect his mood? No, she said. When things aren’t going well, he’ll say it’s a long season. He starts each day with quiet time—some coffee, some devotional reading, sometimes work-related reading. Sometimes he’ll send his kids things he has read, or maybe a quote or Bible verse.
Given Greg’s work, Krista has become a baseball fan, too. And the Battery? “I love the Battery,” she said. She said they’ll have date nights there, arriving early, going to a favorite restaurant and then to a game. She said the Battery is “a great gathering place for families.” (Greg said that sometimes he’ll sit down in a restaurant in the Battery and say to himself, almost with wonder,
“I can’t believe we own this place.”)
Peoria isn’t what it was when Heller was young. There’s not a lot of opportunity there now, Heller said. Caterpillar is gone and, like many universities, Bradley has made budget cuts and is dealing with lower enrollment. But Heller’s ties to Peoria remain strong—his father died in 2017, but his mother and Krista’s parents still live there. And the character traits picked up in early days in Peoria are very much a part of life for the family in Atlanta.
“Protect the place and get deals done.”
Safety and minimizing legal problems for the Braves are key parts of Heller’s role as chief legal officer. “I’m Mr. No Fun,” he said wryly.
Working on big deals such as those involving development of the Battery is the most impressive of Heller’s professional accomplishments. But he and the Braves’ legal team, including three other lawyers and three support staff, have a broad range of legal issues to deal with—safety; intellectual property rights; contract negotiations and enforcement; agreements with other parties related to promotional events, concessions, ticket sales, vendors, and more. The fallout from people involved in fights, falls, flights of drunkenness—they all end up on the plate for Heller and his team.
“Anything that might hit the Braves reflector shield is on my radar,” Heller said. He deals with “whoever is out to get us.” And his guiding principles? “Protect the place and get deals done.”
What has this particular workday been like? In the morning, he participated in a corporate meeting. Then Heller spent time focused on what was happening with the U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment, the giant promoter of concerts and similar events, because the Coca-Cola Roxy theater in the Battery works with Live Nation. He had a meeting concerning a Braves fan’s personal injury complaint related to the Americans with Disabilities Act. “My practice is pretty transaction oriented,” he said.
Does he have anything to do with the Braves’ players? Heller said he interacts fairly often with the team’s general manager, Alex Anthopoulos, but not as often with players. When player contracts go to arbitration, Heller usually represents the team at hearings. And then there are the occasions when a player gets in legal trouble or encounters other legal issues.
One particularly difficult episode involved then-general manager John Coppolella, who was banned from major league baseball for five years by the commissioner in 2017 over infractions involving signing amateur players. How did Heller handle that problem? “Best as I know how,” he said.
Another difficult episode: In 2018, a worker involved in food service at the stadium died when he was asphyxiated in a beer cooler. The legal aftermath has been extensive, and the episode was “very difficult,” Heller said.
Heller is about the future (people) and the past (his alma mater) as well as any immediate problem at hand. Consider Jason Domir, who has been an attorney for the Braves since 2007: How he got there is a story that involves Marquette Law School and Heller’s eagerness to connect with students and young lawyers. Domir was a Marquette student during his first year of law school. He took part in sports law programs organized by Paul Anderson, and at one program he met Heller, whom Anderson had brought in as a speaker. Domir subsequently transferred to Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee, for his last two years of law school. But he retained connections with and warm feelings toward Marquette, including working in sports marketing for Marquette for a period after graduating from law school.
Domir was originally from Atlanta and returned there for a job in 2007. He sent a note to Heller, asking if they could meet. They got together for lunch. Then they met a second time. Heller said he was looking to hire an additional attorney. Within two months of returning to Atlanta, Domir was working for the Braves, and he still does. Domir said he focuses on marketing, sponsorships, special events, community involvement, ticketing, intellectual property issues (bobblehead rights, for one thing), and sometimes player contract review.
He said Heller is “honest, really straightforward, very hard working, caring for his family and employees . . . a great boss and leader.” Heller is someone who thinks ahead on issues and tries to find solutions in everyone’s interest, said Domir, who called him “a true Midwestern gentleman.”
Eve Porter provides another example of loyalties to and by Heller. A Milwaukee native and a 2000 graduate of Marquette University, Porter moved to Atlanta when she finished college. She held several jobs before becoming a receptionist at Turner Sports, which led to a job as an assistant with the Turner legal team, including Heller. When Heller became general counsel of the Braves in 2007, he asked Porter to continue to work with him—and she remains his primary assistant. She wouldn’t have stayed in the job if it wasn’t for the kind of person Heller is, she said.
“He’s very consistent; he’s very genuine,” Porter said. “I think I’ve heard him yell maybe once, and that was through a door.” She said, “He’s a very calm and grounded person. I think his faith plays a strong role in that.”
Heather Metzger worked for years as a paralegal in a law firm that specialized in defending clients involved in medical malpractice claims. She was also an avid Braves fan. She met Heller through a mutual friend, and he told her the Braves were looking for their first paralegal. “I was shocked at how small the legal department was,” said Metzger, who had been involved in transactional legal work. But she took the job and is now in her ninth season with the Braves.
Heller and Domir have been good teachers when it comes to the work that needs to be done, Metzger said, and the work atmosphere is positive, which is why there has been almost no turnover on the legal team, she said. “It’s a dream job,” she said. “The leader that Greg is, he leads by example.”
“Look where we’re sitting.”
Does Heller like his job? He laughed. “Look where we’re sitting,” he said. The windows of Heller’s office look out on the playing field at Truist Park. Below us, Braves players are practicing on the field for the game that night. This job “literally is a dream come true,” he said. He loves baseball, sports, business—and the law. The job has all of those. “You couldn’t come up with a better career.”
And he pursues his career while staying deeply involved with his family and faith. The Hellers followed Greg’s mother’s path and became Catholics, including active involvement in their church in suburban Atlanta and in the Catholic high school their four children attended. The children—Madelyn, Charles, John, and Lizzie—are all now in college or beyond, with Lizzie, the youngest, starting college at Georgetown University this school year and playing soccer there.
Heller’s life advice to his children: Be joyful and kind, enjoy life, and be a good person.
He has stayed loyal to Marquette Law School and its sports law program. When Heller started law school in 1993, the small sports law program was based in a building on the other end of the university, and the idea of sports law as a legal specialty program was almost a novelty in the United States. When Heller began seeking a job, a common response he got to queries to law firms was, “What is sports law? We don’t have a sports law practice.” He said that Marquette law professors, including Martin J. Greenberg, James T. Gray, and Dean Frank C. DeGuire, were ahead of their time when they created the program in 1989.
But the field has grown greatly and, at a ceremony in the Law School’s Eckstein Hall in April 2024, where he received the Alumnus of the Year Award, Heller said the Marquette program is “really the best sports law program in the country.”
In his remarks at the ceremony, Heller talked about Henry Aaron, the legendary baseball figure who was a Braves executive in later years. Heller had an office near Aaron’s, and he described Aaron as “the sweetest, most thoughtful, kind, and caring human being.”
“Mr. Aaron represented to us at the Braves all that is good and noble and right and just about being part of the Braves organization,” Heller said. “And the love and respect and passion that our fans throughout the South have for the Braves and Mr. Aaron are exactly how I feel about Marquette Law School.”
He said “the secret sauce” driving the Law School’s success is “Catholic faith, values, identity, and community, and what it means to be a Marquette lawyer.” He added, “Marquette Law School is an incredible place.”
Many people still regard Henry Aaron as baseball’s all-time home run champion. You can buy a top-of-the-line jersey with his name and number in the Braves clubhouse shop for $500.
Nobody sells Greg Heller jerseys. People don’t even recognize him when he walks among thousands of Braves fans. But perhaps they should. In his own way, Heller has had a lot of big hits, too.
